Bexarotene unlikely to have effect on Alzheimers plaque

Researchers, who included Dr. Rudolph Tanzi of Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and Dr. David Holtzman of Washington University School of Medicine, wanted to see if the stunning results, reported last year in Science journal related to the effect of bexarotene on Alzheimers plaque, could be replicated in their own labs, a standard part of the scientific process.

The researchers failed to see any effects on Alzheimer's plaques in three strains of mice that were treated with bexarotene."There is absolutely no reduction in amyloid levels in the brains of mice treated with this compound," said Sangram Sisodia, a professor of neuroscience at the University of Chicago, of his group's efforts, which were published as a technical comment in the journal Science. Teams at the University of Florida and researchers at the University of Leuven in Belgium published similar findings in the same journal.